The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas is an emerging museum dedicated to the preservation and education of Caribbean and Latin American contemporary art. As a museum, MoCAA is committed to flourishing in the post-pandemic era. The museum dedicates itself to serving the diverse communities of South Florida and the Americas, bringing a range of new voices, artists, methodologies, and practices to the forefront. The Rodriguez Collection, on extended loan to MoCAA, offers outstanding works from Cuban and Latin American contemporary art to engage visitors with paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, and ceramics on display that invite our audiences to investigate their relationship to creativity. The MoCAA Collection is envisioned as a space for research, inquiry, training, exchange, education and community enjoyment. A vital component of the Museum program, The Rodriguez Collection motivates a cultural enterprise of education-through-art in order to provide a broader vision of modern and contemporary art to present and future generations. As a museum, MoCAA is open to debate, discovery and critical thinking, a place for integration and exchange where the notion of community is fundamental. It is a place of concurrence, not opulence, and MoCAA conveys the ongoing deliberate effort to ensure that differences are welcomed and different perspectives are heard so that individuals feel respected and engaged in the Museum’s evolving work.
The new MoCA-Americas emerges as a space dedicated to bringing contemporary art to life as an active cultural bridge among the diverse contemporary art expressions of the Americas. In today's uncertain times, museums can build spaces that encourage dialogue through art. The MoCA-Americas contributes to re-establishing common cultural grounds and building community bridges rather than breeding divisions, through the contemporary art expressions of Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It is established with the belief that museums have a role to play in giving us broader intellectual points of view and better inspiring perspectives on life. MoCA-Americas is a place for visitors to interact with art, to be engaged with artists' personal stories, intriguing objects, compelling images, inclusive community activities, and interactive experiences.
After six successful years of exhibitions, events, traveling shows, publications, community education, and unique artists projects, the Kendall Art Center evaluates its future; in terms of thinking to ensure a relevant and innovative institution for the audiences of tomorrow. After months of intense work, research, and discussions, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas emerges...
Leonardo Rodríguez's work as an "art collector" began in the complex nineties of the last century in his own country of Cuba, where he began collecting antiques. Step by step, his taste in the arts changed, given his attentiveness towards "authenticity and aura," which characterizes his collection. In light of this, it is interesting to note that when Leonardo emigrated from Cuba, he brought only 12 artworks that would eventually become what today is his treasure.
July 15th, 2016, becomes the main event for him and the artists at his side within the art scene in South Florida. It was the birth of the Kendall Art Center (KAC), which opened its doors to the public, created to bring Rodríguez's collection closer to the community as an art experience and educational resource. During the past six years, the Kendall Art Center has become an inspiring art hub and one of the best cultural offerings in South Florida.
The KAC then became an active participant in the art community of South Florida, as well as abroad, while providing education, preservation and awareness of the visual arts. The KAC’s program of exhibitions and activities has become a space for artists to provide creative, intellectual, and emotional insights into society, challenging the traditional approaches to Cuban art. Rodríguez thus became a collector active in supporting a space such as the KAC for artistic visibility, debate, and education on contemporary art.
After six years of intense activity with a fantastic track record of 76 exhibitions produced and presented, Rodríguez and the small team at the Kendall Art Center shaped its shows as a catalyst for art and new ideas to the public. By making Cuban art relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences, the KAC exhibitions, by their nature, mirrored a diverse society marked by a broad Latin American diaspora in South Florida.
Since its beginnings, the Rodíguez Collection that brought forward the KAC has had artistic, curatorial, and intellectual contributions from many artists, scholars, critics, and curators. And the Kendall Art Center was created to bring Rodríguez's collection closer to the community.
The KAC is located in Miami, a diverse city with a multilingual, multicultural population, where more than half of Miami-Dade's residents were born outside the U.S. The end of 2021 brought into discussion a much-needed topic: How do we create bridges of inclusion and exchange among mainstream America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Latin culture? To better understand the impact of globalization on the developmen
The discussions of the KAC leadership and its team move toward searching for a space that can generate new strategies for dealing with multicultural global imaginaries, capable of giving diverse communities new ways to interact with art, oriented toward multiple artistic insights rather than one homogenized vision of art.t of art and relations between Europe, the United States, Latin America, its Diasporas, and its multicultural interactions.
Since its beginnings, the Rodíguez Collection that brought forward the KAC has had artistic, curatorial, and intellectual contributions from many artists, scholars, critics, and curators. And the Kendall Art Center was created to bring Rodríguez's collection closer to the community.
The KAC is located in Miami, a diverse city with a multilingual, multicultural population, where more than half of Miami-Dade's residents were born outside the U.S. The end of 2021 brought into discussion a much-needed topic: How do we create bridges of inclusion and exchange among mainstream America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Latin culture? To better understand the impact of globalization on the developmen
The discussions of the KAC leadership and its team move toward searching for a space that can generate new strategies for dealing with multicultural global imaginaries, capable of giving diverse communities new ways to interact with art, oriented toward multiple artistic insights rather than one homogenized vision of art.t of art and relations between Europe, the United States, Latin America, its Diasporas, and its multicultural interactions.
Since the Magicians de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1989 [Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin], the discussion surrounding curating, collecting, and researching artworks by artists operating outside Europe and the USA became crucial. The crossed dialogue with Western Art has opened the debate on addressing complex questions of cultural identity. Many significant exhibitions regarding artistic diversity, identity, and belonging have occurred; even years after the 1989 Magicians exhibit at the Pompidou. They have substantially expanded the scope of Latin American Art in America.
The KAC is then envisioned for the future, being shaped not just as a gallery or to host Rodríguez's collection, but as a living stage for the community to celebrate creativity, openness, tolerance, and the great art emerging from Cuba, the Caribbean and the Americas. Beyond borders and unnecessary classifications, the future KAC becomes a cultural bridge where diverse cultural, artistic, social, and innovative positions are welcome. It is by sharing the most thought-provoking modern and contemporary art between Western and non-Western aesthetics–be it Cuban, Caribbean, Latin, or North America–that the KAC has now transitioned into a museum organization.
As a successful art center, its leadership moves into the next stage of the institution. A museum plan has been developed by consulting experts in the museum field, and it has taken months of research, evaluation, exchange, and discussions.
We are ready to become a bridge for exchanging the arts of the Americas connected with local and global communities. Through participatory and collaborative projects, the museum will function as a place of discovery, consultation, cooperation, innovation, and interaction with all of the large and small elements of the community.
The Kendall Art Center has become the new MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE AMERICAS.
The Kendall Art Cultural Center (KACC), dedicated the past six years to the preservation and promotion of contemporary art and artists, and to the exchange of art and ideas throughout Miami and South Florida, as well as abroad. Through an energetic calendar of exhibitions, programs, and its collections, KACC provides an international platform for the work of established and emerging artists, advancing public appreciation and understanding of contemporary art.
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The Rodríguez collection is a blueprint of Cuban art and its diaspora. Within the context of the new MoCA-Americas the collection becomes an invaluable visual source for Diaspora identity. It represents a different approach to art history to try to better understand where we come from to better know where we are heading.
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